Archive for August 2009

Dear Google, Amazon and web 2.0: you are doing a great job of providing cool services and apps, you are doing away with obnoxious installation and upgrade steps, your stuff often works out of the box and you offer convenient interfaces. Great.

Comes with a caveat, though: the loss of control of my data and my communication, loss of ability to install and run whichever programs I like. You as central organisations and your ruling governments develop the practical possibility to get at all this data, on a mass basis and retro-actively. Something needs to change about this or we all will be ending in a world with historically unprecedented power structures in the hand of few. A world with virtually no privacy.

Part of what i can do is thinking about cool new technology to counter these developments. I am convinced we need a more decentral application execution infrastructure. We need open cloud software and infrastructure that allows to have easy-to-develop apps run "on the net" – a wealthy network of PCs and mobile phones. A free wireless-type network, not expensive mobile "total control" networks.

Took a few betas but finally i uploaded a 1.0.0 py lib release, featuring the mature and powerful py.test tool and "execnet-style" elastic distributed programming. With the new release, there are many new advanced automated testing features – here is a quick summary:

new plugin architecture, allowing easy-to-write project-specific and cross-project single-file plugins. The most notable new external plugin is oejskit which naturally enables running and reporting of javascript-unittests in real-life browsers.